Google Maps as an Aid for Land Use Planning Decisions.

While numerous land-use planning datasets are publicly available, they are often underutilized by the public-at-large.  This has led to long-term negative economic and environmental consequences.  The objective of this project was to develop methods for making land-use assessment data more easily publicly available over the Internet with a Google Maps interface. A backend scripting program was used to build a dynamic web page that incorporated Google Maps Applications Programming Interface (API).  This program allowed multiple land-use planning transparent overlays to be displayed with Google Maps base data at multiple zoom levels.  With this web page, valuable maps for land-use assessment were easily created; however, the page was quite resource intensive and caused system instability.  Even though this was a problem, this work indicates that these issues can be overcome with further development through the use and automation of image tiling.